Ghost
by roulette rouge
Summary: A war-wearied Resistance soldier finds herself enthralled, and ultimately in love, with the young Kyle Reese. Slightly AU.
1. Liberation Day

_

* * *

_

A/N:

A portion of my more serious writing interests.

Anton Yelchin was beautiful as Reese.  
And though the movie was disheartening to say the least, I believe I must pay a homage to the father of the future.

Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Terminator franchise; it belongs to James Cameron,

* * *

_Liberation Day; May 18, 2015_

_Los Angeles, California_

At last, after years of searching, years of desolation where rays, if even the thinnest of nature, of hope shone through the darkness were vanquished with the fires that annihilated the human race. They have been restored. John Connor has given us a reason to fight back, to wage a full-scale war against Skynet and reclaim the meaning life used to hold for those who had lived to see the last days of the world play out. Some called it a swan song. Its last notes had been so beautiful, some said, that they would never forget it as long as they lived. The lush, green Earth beneath a pearly blue sky, and the rain was so clear that one could dash through its torrents and open their mouth to drink it in. No having to purify it, no having to clamor for shelter when a tumult of clouds heavy with acid rain would encroach upon the hazy brown horizon.

But it was bittersweet, for those who had lived before the ruins. Their swan song had destroyed everything they'd ever loved, their hopes, their dreams. Everything was gone. Everything was ash, and souls of the lost fluttered, white-washed and grey-tinged, within the winds of radiation that consumed all life. All hope. All we'd ever known.

Most of us had never witnessed such a perfect place and would listen solemnly....darkness stealing over our faces in watery shadows of jealousy as we'd listened to the stories of a world we'd never known. We merely lived in a shell of what the world used to be. Now it was a machine. Heartless, desolate, decayed. And as we had hauled the stiff, cold remains of our kindred souls, we began to detach ourselves from all sense of reality. Immerse ourselves into a disconnected sort of dream-world, even though most of us had surrendered our imaginations to the machines and rendered ourselves completely soulless. Easier to exist when it was harder to feel.

We considered our fallen kin to be lucky. Those that were left had a burden to carry, a heavy load to shoulder under the weight of a nearly extinct existence. We had a legacy to keep alive, and for most, the burden proved too much. Sometimes, we'd wake to find many a lifeless body, motionless beneath a thin coat of gathering dust. The rest of us had soldiered on.

The first time I saw him, I was fourteen years old. I knew nothing of him, not his name or his age, not the sound of his voice…only that infinite sorrow that seemed to unwittingly affect all of us, like a broken mask dangling from the edges of a stolid face. Even for one so young, as he was inevitably so, he had a ferocity that hardened his sorrow. An anger that would never yield to the metallic hand of a machine. His eyes were cold and fierce, and he carried himself in a manner that suggested pride and courage. I found myself often wondering, under such harsh and decimating conditions, how a boy his age should happen to find himself capable of grasping a bravery none of us dared hope to have. And so I watched him, and found myself drawn to his unwavering strength.

We never spoke, not once, until Liberation Day, May 18, 2015.

Night had fallen over the ruins of the city. Darkness was mostly hollow, filled with the empty whistle of the wind passing through unmarked graves and the plethora of human skulls riddling the morbid scene. Those of us who were salvaged from the Century Work Camp huddled away from the grisly aftermath of the blast, shielding our eyes, and our children's eyes, away. But it was too late for their innocence; it had long since been carried away with the last gust of the nuclear winds.

John Connor led the procession, looking just as weary and battle-worn as the rest of us, fresh wounds glistening in the moonlight, eyes flashing with that same unwavering arrogance I'd seen in the boy in the work camp. I did not know if he had survived the first resistance, and my heart began to sink as I scanned the crowd of trudging survivors. And as we entered a tunnel, beneath which John Connor had established a military base, I lost all hope in the boy's survival; I realized my folly in attaching myself to the idea of the young soldier too late.

Everyone always said it was better not to invest too much heart into someone who could be living and breathing beside you one moment, and scattered across the desert ruins, dead, the next. Procreation would no longer be an act of love, but a matter of surviving the last of the human race before it was extinguished entirely. It was a sacrifice, and nothing more. In the days to come, John Connor would advise his war-hardened soldiers not to love at all.

As one of the few who harbored enough strength to endure walking when we'd reached the tunnel, I volunteered to help provide those who had been wounded in battle, or otherwise substantially weakened by the conditions of the cruel work camp, with what little supplies could be offered. A grim-faced soldier with sharp, unseeing eyes, shoved a pile of threadbare blankets into my hand as another, beside him, handed a bucket of what looked to be a sort of porridge. I began to wander through the makeshift tunnel, giving blankets to the chilled survivors. Some that I had come across, however, were already dead, many of which were children. I had been given orders upon discovering injuries, severe or minor, to dress them as best I could with what scanty medical tools I'd been given. Needles to say, many of whom which I came across were severely, if not fatally, wounded.

It was as I neared the end of the tunnel, only a few left of the weathered blankets in my arms, when I saw him. He was shivering noticeably, his heavily callused hands attempting to caress a bit of warmth back into his frozen arms. But his expression manifested no discomfort, not even an edge of pain that would have normally sharpened the creases of worry in a wounded man's face. He was determined, I knew, to show no weakness.

I ambled, hesitant, toward the boy, clutching the blankets so hard in my grasp that I felt my hands begin to tingle, the taut skin that stretched over my knuckles turning a chalky white. This boy had become somewhat of a beacon of hope for me, his undaunted courage in the face of such a merciless fate inspiring to a slowly dying race. Even so, he was wounded and, as the other women were tending to their own responsibilities, it was my obligation to address mine as well.

"Blanket?" I asked, masking the timid shudders that rippled throughout my voice.

He had apparently been concentrating, and once I had disturbed him in his state of weakness, he became instantly alert. Flashing green eyes penetrated my line of vision, and he studied me for a moment, brow furrowing darkly. "No," he muttered. "There's no need."

"You'll catch your death down here," I retorted quietly. "The cold will only get worse."

"Surely you are aware that we have faced much crueler conditions," he snapped. "There are others who need them much more than I do."

I kneeled beside him, setting the bundle of tattered cloth at my feet and took out the first aid tin box out of my faded green overcoat. His muscles tautened visibly and, as I averted my eyes away from the opened kit and into his face, I saw his jaw clench.

"What are you doing?" He asked.

"Dressing your wound," I replied. "Under John Connor's orders."

"Listen, I can tend to my own wounds," he insisted wearily, as if annoyed by my persistence. "Go and look after the others. I'll be fine."

"No, you listen to me," I responded, grimly, feeling a flare of fiery anger burst throughout my exhausted body. "It is my duty to tend to your wounds. If you will be stubborn and refuse well then….I'll have one of the soldiers come over here and restrain you. It is no use wasting your strength on such silly defiance, so will you behave or not?"

I watched him with a furious glower, but he merely stared back, the markings of a suppressed smile beginning to twitch beneath the corners of his bloodstained mouth.

"Fine," he said, slowly. "If it makes you feel important, go right on ahead and do it. Makes no difference to me."

With a disgruntled huff, I flopped down beside him and tore open a disinfecting swab. Gently, I dabbed the deep, but short gash that tore open his chin. He flinched, but only slightly, and watched with fascination as I scoured the wound.

"Do you have a name, soldier?" I inquired absently, eyes downcast as my hands groped through the dressings and ointments for a long ribbon of gauze.

He did not answer for a moment, his thoughts inclined toward the dressing I was applying to a long, thin slash jutting in a grisly line across his arm.

But at last, after months of desperate musing, of wandering in endless tendrils of lost thought after the boy with no name, I received my answer.

"Reese," he said, voice airy, almost distant. "Kyle Reese."


	2. Secrets and Stakeouts

A/N: This is going to be just something I updated sometimes, like a drabblefic. Again, homage to Yelchin's beautiful Reese portrayal in the midst of a mediocre piece of filming.

Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Terminator Franchise. If I owned Kyle Reese, he'd be my love slave. ;D

* * *

_Anniversary of Judgment Day; August 27, 2018_

_Sacramento, California_

It was our only hope, if we were so desperate to be initiated into the resistance as a soldier, a fighter for the wretched battle against the machines.

We had to prove ourselves, Perry had said. We had to be strong if we were to survive the hardships of war. Not just malnutrition, or the sufferings of bereavement, or the plaguing insomnia that consumes the soul, nor the sleep that fills itself with horrifying dreams. War was different, he claimed; it had a way of distorting and deforming the mind.

But for the majority of us, that was hardest part of living in this wasteland. There was nothing to do but wither. Nothing to do but wait for death. Some of us couldn't stand lying in the filth of the Los Angeles underbelly and wait for time to end; we had to help in the perpetual struggle for what we knew was rightfully ours.

Kyle Reese wanted nothing more than to become a soldier.

It was a dream to end all lost dreams for him. To fight back against the automation world that had relieved him of his future. One of love, of life and hope and security. He was utterly bereft, now, of all emotions. Fear, though…he still clung to fear, but only as pretense - to satisfy his need for selfless courage.

With each passing day, each red-hazed sunset, Kyle lost a little more of his humanity. And I kept it, all of it that he lost to starvation and fear and restlessness. There was a little safe compartment, deep in the recesses of my soul, that I kept for him, and only him, so that, if he ever needed it, any little shard of feeling sentiment, I would give it to him. Willingly, and without hope for any sentiment in return.

Perry knew I was in love with him. He had been alive before the nuclear holocaust, and knew the eyes of love when he looked upon them. I was with Kyle always, by his side through infiltrations and sickness, when he would surrender to vulnerability and allow himself to speak of things he dared never tell anyone else. It was why Perry had been so intent on transferring me out of his regiment, away from ruin, as he told me once…

"_You love him, don't you…"_

_I'd never told him. Hell, I never told anyone my secrets. They were as good as the dirt beneath our feet in the eyes of the resistance, and so I saw no use for their needless exhuming. I needed no further distractions from the tasks at hand._

"_Sir?" I asked, feigning ignorance._

"_**Reese**," barked the short-tempered sergeant as he throttled me with his biting words. The man's pearl-edged scar gleamed pale beneath the shattered remains of moonlight stealing through a crack in the door. "You love him, don't you?"_

"_Sergeant Perry, you and I both know I'm too tired to be falling in love - I can barely pick myself up off the ground as it is." I snorted, attempting to hide the trembling fear of discovery deep beneath the callus of my quaking hands. I shoved them into the crevices of pockets in my threadbare vest. He couldn't see them there. "Reese is merely my partner, and I see to it that his life persists another day, as he sees to mine."_

_He pursed his lips, but said nothing else on the matter of convention, and instead switched tactics. "In this world, love is only a path to ruin. Many have lost the ability, and I'm sure you are aware that Kyle is merely the majority. His only love is for the resistance...there's nothing left for him but to hope."_

"_I understand sir," I replied. "But there is no such threat. I wouldn't lie to you."_

_He was not satisfied with my declaration of rebuttal. Cocking his brow, his eyes began to pour into me, searching for the vaguest hint of a lie. "Wouldn't you, Ghost?"_

_I returned to my post before I could give myself away, hoping my evasive action would prove useful for my lost cause._

It was not a falsehood I could sleep so easily upon.

Kyle was not _only_ my partner. He couldn't be reduced to just another faceless drone in the midst of mechanical war on account of my own guilty despair. Kyle's life could not be cheapened in any way, at least not to me. I could never nullify his existence like that, to deceive myself into thinking of him like second rate garbage, the tendrils of dust that gathered beneath my tattered boots. There was no doubting his importance to me; he was my reason for living, the only thing I woke for in the morning to face the routine haze of casualty and slaughtered hope that clouded the underground resistance base like a deathly fog. The reason I looked past the empty eyes, the tangled bodies, and remembered that I was worth something to someone - when I died, there was Kyle to bury me. He _gave_ a flying fuck about me.

He was my friend, my cohort, the first unrequited love I'd ever have, and ever hope to have again.

Not to mention, more humorously, my pillow.

There was not a softer shred of linen that could match the gentle planes of Kyle Reese's chest or shoulder, perhaps, sometimes, even his stomach, which I deemed my favorite sleeping place of all. For such a war-hardened boy, bereft of his humanity, he was so very soft, like the tattered remains of velvet curtains I'd found once during a stakeout with him in an old ruined house. And he even enjoyed allowing me to sleep on him, a confession I did not take lightly, claiming that I was warm and warded off the chill within the ethereal hours of gray, early morning.

It was early morning now, and as I began to drift into trance-like somnolence. After two days without sleep, I was submerged beneath a stupor, an existence I endeavored to avoid as much as I possibly could. But before I could completely disappear into sweet, black oblivion, Kyle's voice dragged my resistant being back into consciousness with the uncharacteristic softness of his words.

"You know, I haven't noticed how beautiful the sky was in a long time," he mused, and I focused my vision to find him lounging on his back, his torn, dilapidated backpack behind his head, and his disheveled blonde hair began to brush softly against his dirt-streaked forehead. "I always kind of just…ignored it for so long…"

He turned to look at me, anticipating an answer, but I was too immersed in dreary fatigue to say much of anything. I heard a bit of scuffling as his blurred figure stood from his place on the dust-sodden floor, and his hardened footsteps coming nearer, until they stopped altogether beside me. He slouched against the wall and slumped to the floor, saying nothing at first. But his silence held enough awkward words for the both of us.

"You tired already?" He asked dazedly as my head hung flaccidly over his soft, padded shoulder. "We just slept two days ago. Twelve hours of sleep, remember?"

He made it sound so _easy. _And here I was, the portrait of frailty as the brushstrokes of weariness began to graze me with the familiarity of waves - the ebb and flow shuffling forth to meet me and draw me closer into its sweet embrace.

I struggled for words, groping through the haze to find coherency. "Unlike you...some of us, well...we can't run on empty."

All I recieved in reply was a snort of amusement.

As I leaned closer into him and his arm draped itself over my shoulders, I realized he smelled awful. It was nothing new, of course, just the dirt, sweat, and blood we accumulated over the course of the years and had come to recognize as routine. There was also a tinge of oil, a rusty scent that he always seemed to wear like a sort of strange perfume. I reckoned, though, through my sleep-induced trance, that I smelled just as horrid, and I sincerely hoped for the first time in ages; I prayed for an obliging river on our journey that night for a well-deserved, and not to mention _long_ overdue, bath.

It was as I was lying there, listening to the hollow sound of his breathing flow through my ears like music. The elders had told us of music, before even Sergeant Perry's time. They spoke of clear, ringing trumpets and melancholy piano keys bending and dancing beneath dexterous fingertips.

But of all the enticing sounds they described to us, of all the music and echoes and beauty of notes before the last days of Earth, I could never imagine a more beautiful resonance than Kyle's breathing. It was almost like a wraith, if I could personify it in terms of a semi-solid being, and though usually its innate sense of caution subdued the musical softness it made, for now, it was content, full-figured and unafraid. He breathed easier under the cover of shelter, the ease sunlight brought with its warming shade, and I couldn't resist its mellow lullaby.

"Kyle," I murmured, nuzzling my face eagerly into the sullied material of his camoflauge jacket.

I heard a vague rustling."What, Ghost?"

"Do you think we'll ever see an end to this war?" I asked. "Do you think, maybe, in the years to come, we'll be able to fall in love again?"

Kyle emitted a disgruntled sort of snort. "What is love anyway?" He replied tersely. "Weakness, I'd say. I don't think we really need it."

"But do you think…do you think we ever will?"

He sighed, and settled a weary, gloved hand over my limp, dirty hair. "I don't know," he said solemnly. "I really don't know."

It was then that I realized I could never tell him, not if the secret would be my downfall, the death of me.

I could never tell Kyle Reese that I loved him. And that was that.


	3. His Birthday Present

**A/N: **

**Here's another chapter for my Terminator drabblefic.**

**Let me know if Kyle is getting too soft or OOC.**

**Again, homage to Yelchin's beautiful Reese portrayal in the midst of a mediocre piece of filming.**

**Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Terminator Franchise. If I owned Kyle Reese, he'd be my love slave. ;D**

**_ACCESS GHOST PLAYLIST ON MY PROFILE._**

* * *

_Eighteenth Anniversary of Ghost's Birth; November 15, 2017_

_Los Angeles, California_

I couldn't care less who he was.

If I could care at all about anyone else, I wouldn't waste the opportunity for an appeal to sympathy on a man I would forget in a matter of hours. It didn't matter what kind of weapons he harbored a certain partiality for, or if he had a taste for weaponry at all. It was useless to ponder over the glass-thin surface of his personality. If he told good jokes that could make even the most stoic man crack a mirthful smile, or if he had a weakness for dandelions, the sturdy weed that contradicted the laws of beauty and strength. I was impartial toward his character, his intelligence, his stamina and speed.

All that mattered was that he reminded me of Kyle. The moment I met him, I was struck hard with the revelation of this certainty. His lips, the omnipresent intensity that pierced his gaze and warded off the war-wearied countenance which pervaded my own existence. The voice that was soft and forceful, gentle and commanding, all at the same time. A walking contradiction in his own right, just like my beloved partner. And I wanted him; I wanted him the moment I realized he was a replica of my heart's first and foremost yearning.

Perhaps, if I were in a different world, if I were a different girl, I would be ashamed. I was perforated with a tangible shame as thick as blood racing through water, for banishing my primal need for human sympathy in the midst of this perpetual human calamity and trading it for selfish instinct. But I couldn't be held accountable for anything in my own mind. Not now. And perhaps, not ever.

He had the same brooding eyes, the same homegrown intensity that had manifested in sheaths of ghosting arrogance and courage within Kyle's own comatose soul. It was what drew me toward him first, searching the recesses of paper-thin green and shades of grasping blue that traced the edges of the boy's pooling wonderment and lust. Same age, same build, same oil-based aura that caressed Kyle's figure in its strange, unnerving aroma. And so I forgot his name. I disregarded his shortcomings, the same way I dismissed Kyle's quick temper and heedless focus.

In a world founded on compromise and tests of audacity needed for constant survival, alcohol was no longer a matter of fake identification and sheer determination. In fact, it no longer existed at all as, what the elders deemed it, liquid courage. It could not be relied on for anything, not valor, or blatant honesty, or the indifference of regret. Humanity relied on the correlation of heart and mind in light of the extinction of alcohol and its purpose.

But here and now, beneath a veil of half-darkness that shielded me from the contempt of reality, I would pretend. Pretend it was Kyle's callused fingers drawing patterns of butterfly's wings over my dirt-encrusted skin, over the scars which told authentic stories, if one had the capacity to listen hard to their harsh, raised voices.

And as those hands, basking in Kyle's anonymity, explored its new opportunity for unchartered territory, those daunting plains of feminine delicacy he'd never discovered before, I remembered the stories of those scars. I listened to their pearl-edged voices, reached into the fathoms in which their roots dug into lucid memory. Kyle had been there; he was always the savior, always the hero of their desperate tales.

It was not as hard as the elders had said it would be, slipping into the sacred netherworlds of fantasy. I'd searched hard for the right tools to find my way there, and this boy, hardly older than myself, than Kyle, had been the way into this fabled and consecrated haven. I could even make myself believe that his voice, in its shielding whispers, was Kyle's, breathing my name into the fabric of my skin. His lips abandoning small circles of slobber over my exposed flesh, his nails which embedded themselves, little creatures sharpened by lust and wanton need, into the arch of my spine, the fragile upheaval of soul and breath and heart that I could hear flitting through the moans escaping like ghosts from his parted mouth. It's Kyle, I'm reminded. Kyle's soft lips flickering across my neck, Kyle's callused seizure of my sunburned skin, Kyle's moans penetrating my disoriented ears.

His method of rhythm and poise that I matched to every step, every small detail of Kyle's existence could be fabricated with even a small amount of imagination. And I could only thank the rust-tarnished heavens, every sunrise and sunset, for allowing me to keep my ability to dream.

Kyle himself, I knew, would have been disgusted with these actions, these thoughts, but my only excuse would be born of despair. And as I lay still in my nameless lover's barren arms, melded into the curve of his body, I wondered about him.

How could he know this anguish? This desolation of never knowing? He had never loved before, never even entertained this moment of pure, unfastened misery and bereavement that I felt in giving myself to someone I'd only wished was him. How would he ever comprehend feeling as hollow as I did now in regards to love?

Only months before, I'd resolved my own pragmatic wanderings. It had never been a question of how, but of when…when to reveal to Kyle my capability of feeling. And it was not because of reluctance to let go, surely a contradictive explanation to the truth which I could never admit to. It was because of him that I could still desire the warmth of human affection…all because of him. I could curse him for strengthening the string of attachment, or deem him the angel responsible for the salvaging of my own soul, despite the loss of his.

I crawled from beneath the flesh-hued manacles which held me much too close to betrayal. He was only a manifested image of my selfish treachery now, no longer a quelling of overwhelming desire or a stimulus for dormant imagination, but a brazen disobedience toward my love for Kyle. It was a rebellion that my heart did not take lightly, and as I redressed into my tattered Resistance attire, I felt something inside go utterly numb. Perhaps in response to the cause of my thoughtless actions, or perhaps in response to its effects.

Kyle was only a few yards away from the darkened alley in which my sleeping partner now lay abandoned to crooked darkness. No shadows of somnolent surrender darkened his features, but a gray sallow shroud pronounced his need for rest. My arms seemed to conceal the regret that I now wore in the folds of my torn clothes, in the darker concaves of my searching eyes.

They pried for his far off attention, his gaze solely consumed by a small trinket, a tiny little thing he outlined in gashes with his rusted pocket knife. But as I drew closer, he seemed to hear me and his muted scrutiny, that fleeting moment of frail gentleness, dissipated within the smothered, summer air. The formidable austerity returned to him, and sharpened his slouching posture.

I dropped to my knees, and shuffled into the empty slot beside him, heaving a shallow sigh as I settled into the curve of his figure. His hair was damp with sweat still from our returning mission, gleaming beneath the jagged cracks of simpering moonlight.

"It was your birthday today."

The way he murmured it suggested the gentle air of reminder. Not inquisition, not justification…but a simple prodding of faulty memory. My shoulders lifted, slightly, an apathetic gesture designed to communicate my indifference toward the anniversary date. I spent the day of my birth obliterating T600's and happening upon decomposing bodies of children and their mindlessly slaughtered families, upon remains of shattered Terminators – it was merely protocol, another day, and another step toward a renovated future.

"Well, it must matter, since this was the day you were born and, if this day held no significance for me, you wouldn't be alive and I would have a different partner." Kyle explained as his fingers wrung the mysterious trinket within his grasp, working its texture over the callus of his flesh.

He sighed, unfurling his palm like a flower unravels the petals from its center. "I made you something. Not a big deal, just some wood I found in the burnt house we were sent to yesterday. I was carving it while you were in there, with Jacobs."

He was right. It wasn't much at all, simply a half-blackened piece of wood carved into a heart-rounded formation, with deeper tracings carved into its figure. And after a moment of scrutinizing the small ornament, a revelation sunk into my thought process – it was a small heart-shaped replica of the earth, covered in what looked to be a waxy substance, covering the structure of the wooden heart-globe in a glossy luster.

"I used some of the candle wax for the protective coating, to keep it safe from sweat and water and blood, since we're pretty much covered in it all the time. I don't know how long it'll hold, so you might wanna…you know…redo it when it starts coming off…"

Kyle removed the spare chain that hung around his neck, the steely gray line that dangled like a shadow behind his mandatory dog tags, and slipped the small hole he'd made through the end of the metal band. He motioned for me to turn around and, with a smile, I allowed him to drape the chain over my head, clasping it securely behind my neck.

As I turned to face him once more, I held the delicate little heart beneath careful fingertips, as if cautious not to tarnish its innate beauty, smiling as I fixated an intent stare on its waxed figure.

"I guess you could say it's for a lot of things…"Kyle continued. "A symbol of hope when you feel like you're losing faith in me, in the Resistance. Perhaps even my promise to you and the Resistance that I will do whatever is possible as a solitary man to beat fucking Skynet and take back our world for our own."

He realized his own heated change of conduct, and smoothed his ruffled feathers for a moment, pausing as he searched for less severe words.

"You know, I do care about you. I mean, god, you're the sister my mom never got around to making, you know?" He gave a short, cynical laugh at the thought of his mother, staring off into a void of black shadows. "I am aware of the fact that sometimes I don't show it. But, it's like…if I don't show vulnerability…that I'm predisposed for weakness, then weakness won't come looking for me, and I'll….I'll be safe."

His last statement was one of recognition, a declaration of his unending insurgence against the specter of emotion and weakness that plagued the nightmares of every Resistance soldier. A nightmare which I lived, a solitary figure amidst the decay and obscurity of an emotion-driven world. One I wished to escape, but in which I was held captive by this one man. This…this boy I held so close to me.

He licked his lips absently, and averted his transfixed, forceful gaze upon me once again, recovering from his lapse into dreaded poignancy. I let go of the charm and leaned forward, into his sweat-sodden, beaten, wounded form, gathering his taut body into my arms and burying my face into his shoulder. He immediately responded to my embrace, pulling me closer to him. It was the gentleness of Reese that I was hardly allowed the privilege to see, but sought for so intently. And seeing him this way, as if he cared for me the way I cared for him, was enough of a birthday present than I could ever ask for.

"Thank you, Kyle," I murmured into his dust-riddled ear. "Thank you so much…"

_This chain, this little trinket… it means the world to me. __**You**__ mean the world to me._

_And I love you….God, how I fucking love you. I always have._

_And I promise you….I always will._


	4. Mortal Revelation

**A/N: **

**Here's another chapter for my Terminator drabblefic.  
I'll be updating TFH and Awakening soon, for my Chekov writers, soon.  
I promise.**

**Let me know if Kyle is getting too soft or OOC.**

**Again, homage to Yelchin's beautiful Reese portrayal in the midst of a mediocre piece of filming.**

**Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Terminator Franchise. If I owned Kyle Reese, he'd be my love slave. ;D**

**_ACCESS GHOST PLAYLIST ON MY PROFILE._**

* * *

_The Week Following the Eighteenth Anniversary of Ghost's Birth; November 22, 2018_

_Los Angeles, California_

It was darkness, and the stench of death rose like plumes of heat from the fresh-tilled earth. The blushing, red-tinged soil was disturbed by pooling shards of blood, escaping the ravenous flames which consumed our fallen comrades. But the fumes of folding, crinkling flesh beneath the jaws of inferno no longer affected us; we were impervious to the recoiling nature of our forefathers. It was mere afterthought, death. An afterthought of life and its vacancies, filling with hope and light where there was once only darkness and decay.

It was all I could think about, as I watched the blaze greedily devour dissolving, seething flesh in the wake of its frothing slobber. It reminded me so much of the watch dogs at the door, thick wads of white juices spilling from their mouths, as if customary greeting. But it turned wretched and mindless as their chops glistened with anticipation, the smell of death suspended over still, hushed air.

Sometimes, when the body count became too high, there was little left to do but dispose of them in any means possible - and so, as ostensibly cruel as it was, they were reduced to meat. No longer named or deemed by their character, their strength and their vigor. But food for our security, our ravenous dogs, and our reasoning for such calloused methods of clearance was occasionally vanquished by the strings of attachment. I thought of the possibility often – how would Kyle dispose of me, if I were to die too?

A hand roused me from the pensive haze. It was not commandeering, confiscating my attentions from their faraway retreat by brute force.

But hardly was it soft and intangible, a mere sidelong brush of flesh against resisting flesh. Kyle's touch was desperate, and as I rebelled against encroaching deliberation of the simmering mounds of flesh nearby, I turned my attention toward Kyle.

The softness in his gaze, a rarity I was seldom permitted as a result of fast maturing vigilance, had all but faded into the underlying thickness of a harsh façade. This was the face I could not so easily dismantle; it was the vestige of the soldier, and Kyle was lost to the battlefield.

"Got the E.F.P.?" Kyle hissed, and waves of gore-sodden breath sharpened my senses. I reached forward, and when my hand retreated from the corner of his mouth, blood stained and trickled down my inquisitive fingers.

"Kyle, you're bleeding…" I began, and his hardened gaze never abandoned the infiltration of advancing Terminators.

God, they were so close…I could hear the scathing chafe of metal against metal from where I lay, camouflaged by the reaching hands of darkness, cloaking our vulnerable bodies in blessed disguise.

"It's a flesh wound. Fuck, just forget it; Ghost…the E.F.P., hurry!"

Rushed silence was the key to a two man attack on a cluster of freshly produced T600's. It was a savored moment for Kyle; watching the detonation descend upon the witless machines, watching their metal frames burst from the waves of heat and force and combustion all at once, scatter across the barren, cracked earth in tendrils of twisted metal and blackened steel jaws, the scarlet glow of their penetrating eyes snuffed out like the light of a candle caught within a gust of vengeful wind.

For a moment, Kyle was motionless. His body grew taut as he calculated the distance from the cluster, shifting further and further away as their soulless vermillion eyes searched the perimeter for remnants of human presence.

In moments, our shrouds could be pulled back by intrusive metal fingers, and hope would be fleeting. Kyle would reach for an endeavor, one last attempt to salvage our miserably disheveled lives. The lives of two soldiers who, in the end, were merely specks of dusts upon the achingly long woven ties of life. And darkness would sway and churn and brim over, the light would shatter the thin black void. Life would end.

Regarding this plausible conclusion, and the gradual lessening of time as it slipped through our fingers like sand through a sieve, he hastened. Acknowledging the thinning spectrum of time we were allotted, he turned to me, desperation filling his eyes to their brims, like a plague of rolling mists over vague, sandy knolls.

Slow and painful, the formless luster of dread struck a chord of trepidation in me that I could hardly quell with plain self-talk. If Kyle was unnerved…then how was I supposed to feel?

"Here's the plan," Kyle turned to me, his watery gaze shimmering beneath the thin shards of moonlight stealing away the precious gloom. "You're gonna create a distraction. Not a big fucking 'hey, let's kill the rogue human'…just a little sound to get their attention, to draw them in. Now, you're gonna go over there by that car, you see it?"

He pointed to a nearby heap of junk, and I nodded as he averted his line of sight to meet mine. "Go over there. Find the biggest rock you can, and throw it over by the gas tank. Don't let them know where you are, or you're as good as dead, you hear me? Not. One. Fucking. Peep…."

He paused, seizing his breath before it escaped him. And I caught my own; it had been a long time since I'd detected such throttling austerity in Kyle's voice.

"Once they all gather around the tank, I'll throw the E.F.P and we'll high tail it out of here. Straight for the base. Got it?"

"Got it."

"We have to make sure they don't follow us there, if one of them manages to survive the blast…" Kyle's hands reached into the tattered bag thrown over his shoulder. "Go on. Be fucking quiet as a church mouse…" And as I began my ascension, into the smoldering air, Kyle grasped for my hand. "Ghost….good luck."

It could have been, perhaps, one of the quietest moments in my life. Nothing but repressed breath and heart and footfalls as somber and silent as the shallowest of graves. And as a reward for my muted, surreptitious relocation, my life was spared.

Covert movement in a precarious position such as our current situation was a necessity, especially if one was counting on witnessing another gloss-red sunrise, or waking to the comforting aura of morning breath and the reek of unwashed flesh.

And so I was successful in my transfer, either of an endeavor born of sheer will or of fear itself, and, as directed, chose the largest, most jagged stone of the bunch. Once I had a fair grip on the biting edges of the stone, I chucked it toward the direction of the abandoned, rust-ridden gas station. It clanged against the metal, a dull, flat sound that broke the heavy quietude and, as planned, captured the attention of the T600's.

It was not long before the cyborgs had convened around the origin of the undetected movement. They were programmed to sift through their surroundings, separate and ignore what was necessary and what was not. The sound needed a catalyst, and where there were catalysts – there were humans.

Kyle wasted not a moment. As soon as the entirety of the T600 bunch was gathered into its small curious circle, he activated the E.F.P and flung it toward the unsuspecting machines.

And as the deafening blast and the heat of combustion spread across the desert sands, ruffling their tawny somnolence, Kyle and I ran.

Ran for base, for cover, for _sanctuary_.

And, much to my pleasant surprise, Kyle had reached for me as we dashed through the cover of star-pricked night, his fingers clenching urgently over mine. _Don't let go_, they urged me, _and stay by my side_.

It was a shame when he finally let go, skidding to an uncalculated halt behind another abandoned heap of rusted, charred metal, which, at one time before the blast, had been part of a metal compost. Kyle's breath traced soft whorls and the secrecy of our triumph over my exposed neck as we huddled behind the trash heap, and he scrutinized the far stretch of flame-brushed horizon for uncanny movement.

His eyes were watery from the thick blast of smoke which had invaded our cover, and he was breathless, grasping for any measure of unsullied air to clear his contaminated lungs. But he was fastidious when it came to the art of security, and it was a moment before he dared to shift from the crouching position into which we had settled, waiting for a sharp sense of certainty.

"Is it safe, Kyle?" I whispered, and I felt the soot-dusted length of his arm release its crushing hold.

"Yeah," he responded detachedly, eyes still scanning the deserted grounds. "Go in, I just want to make sure none of those metal motherfuckers survive and take advantage of us…"

"I'll get us some food…" I assured him and, as I received no answer, merely a grunt and air of utter distraction from the restless figure, I ducked beneath the low-structured door to the entrance of the dilapidated hut.

Once inside, I pulled back the trap-door to reveal a dark, shadowed corridor and a blessed chill crept from within the mortared stone walls. After a quick recitation of my identification number and name, I was permitted access to the underground base. Nearby, perhaps a mere five feet from the stone-wall partition and measly splintered wood door, was a blubbering tub of food.

Now when I mentioned the word food, the term was not to be taken literally. Food, under such circumstances where cans were hard to come by, had been reduced to that of a luxury. All that was left was the few rows of oats and wheat the women, who were not able-bodied for combat, had managed to grow under artificial light bulbs salvaged by obliging soldiers and water they had parted with for the sake of sheer survival.

As a result of their self-sacrifice, the soldiers were provided for – and though it was meager and tasted of polluted irrigation tanks, it allowed some nutrition to flow throughout emaciated and exhausted bodies.

The only console it could offer was its innate warmth, filling the aching chill of cold bones with a satisfying revival.

By the time Kyle had dragged his wearied feet to our designated sleeper mats, I had already begun to ravage my own portion of gruel.

"C'mere…"I muttered, wiping my sleeve across my mouth, and the sudden sound of my voice rattled Kyle's whetted senses. I had startled him, I knew it by the traces of clouded darkness which held his angular, sallow features in a cold, ghostly grip. But once he had settled before me, cross-legged and foul-smelling as ever, the shrouds had already fled. Shifted into their cryptic sepulchers, resting within their condemned graves until roused again from wakeful darkness.

For years, I had detested Kyle's scent. It reminded me of the decay of human society, of the sufferings he endured for a future he would, quite possibly, never be able to experience for himself. One that I figured I'd never see, but merely fabricate within my somnolent mind as a fantastic dream. And as unpleasant as it had been to be around two stinking bodies at first, my own and his, it had become a comfort for me, over the years that followed. A reminder that he was human and warm and just…there. Alive and breathing beside me.

"Leave it alone…and stop fussing over me." He wrenched himself away from the dabbing cloth, and I, in rebuttal of his gesture, reached forward and grabbed his face, yanking it back to its place.

"I'm not fussing…I just don't want your lip to fall off from gangrene…" I explained, and extended a blind, groping hand behind me for the slouching material of my canteen. Once I'd retrieved the elusive little pouch from its hidden placement, I tore off a shred of nuisance fabric from my decrepit tawny overcoat and doused it with tepid water.

"Water waster." He grumbled, and I cast him a withering look.

"Yeah well…this water waster is saving your big mouth. So hush."

It was mercifully silent for a moment as I scoured the long, shallow slash across Kyle's torn lips. And once it was free of all blood, and seemed unable to spout anymore, I released him, searching for a face beneath the smeared dirt and smatterings of blood which polluted his handsome countenance.

Gentlness had become an uncharacteristic ability that few soldiers were able to accomplish. But being a woman, and half-prone to a programming of maternal mildness, I was able to reach out and softly wipe away the rubbish from Kyle's soiled warrior's vestige, and the mask dangled at its torn, ragged edges. And as the soldier's charade fell away, it revealed, beneath its carefully contoured corners and thickly laid misgivings, another battle entirely. The battle of reckless adolescence, between the heedless musings of a boy and the veiled, patient calculations of a man.

He watched me closely, inquisitive and unmarked by wariness, until I set aside the dirtied cloth and marveled at my handiwork. There it was...that seraphic face I'd longed to see, and its appearance provoked a smile from my pale-faced indolence.

"There....I guess there was a face beneath the mask of dirt."

A snort escaped him, a gesture that I deemed as the only capable reaction from him after the delivery of such a wry remark, and he then slid into the spot beside me, back slouching wearily against the cold brick wall. I waited a moment for him to situate hmself, and then handed him the spare tray of gruel.

Kyle, in his most desperate moments of absolute starvation, generated for me a pretense of fair manners, at least compared to his own eating habits. It was when I would, out of profound misery, forsake my scanty meal for a moment, and watch my beautiful, dust-sodden, and mournfully gaunt-faced companion frantically gorge his own paltry rations.

It was akin to recognizing an angel, in all his wondrous, ethereal beauty, draped in gray-washed rags, the threads worn away and frayed so that the placated glow would nudge through its mortal guise and blind the unseeing eye. It was heartrending and, ultimately, a murderous pillager of appetites.

He seemed content enough with the gruel. Little rivers of the insipid gray matter dribbled down the raised, pearly flesh of the old ragged scar, grazing across the masculine curve of his chin.

But Kyle's contentment was an unconscious resignation. There was nothing more to hope for but boiled gray oats and unraveling blankets and a thin coat of dust to grace the surface of his tepid drinking water. Quiet acquiescence, a reasonably petty price to pay for a renovated future.

And, to my chagrin, an acceptance that I would rather have not exhumed from the fathoms of Kyle Reese's eyes.

In his hunger-induced focus, he did not detect my perception of him. With the guard of vigilance all but dismantled behind the glazed, passion-glossed eyes, and stored away into the anticipating caverns of his mind, Kyle was solely focused on gorging his body with as much water-based oatmeal as it could handle. The sound of his content sipping and thick swallowing beside me was enough to satisfy an irrational, and yet innate, concern which temporarily confiscated my need for self-indulgence. And once that hunger had been sated, I returned to my own physical compulsions and eyed the tray of gray-tinged meal before me.

At first, the fresh band of soldiers that had entered the underground lair was mere white noise to my apathetic ears. More mouths to feed, another parched throat to wet and satisfy. In my years amongst the teachings for the art of apathy, I had learned that any human being, apart from Kyle, was a nuisance in the department of self-subsistence. And so, they became somewhat of a nameless enemy to me. The cruelty of such a thought, at first, invaded me with a remorse that ruffled the sleepy folds of my agitated, waking hours, hours I'd arranged for rest and recuperation. Hours that, instead, I'd spent listening to Kyle's comfortable snoring beneath my cheek.

But as the years wore on, it became second nature, another blink of an eye, another drawn breath. And as habitual as it was to breathe, to blink, it became basic routine for me to disregard the existence of any other soldier except for my beloved partner.

And so it was not the nature of their arrival that disturbed my lackluster interest, but instead, ultimately, of what they were conversing so raucously about.

"…Jacobs…he just….right in front of me…burst into flames. Couldn't take the screaming, couldn't take the agony of watching him burn and suffer like that. But what could I do, you know? T600's are nasty motherfuckers. Get caught by one of them, and you're….good as dead…."

Jacobs. Dead. The man I'd only just been with, as mere indulgence, a week before. He'd been alive then. Forceful with yearning and strength and vigor. He'd still harbored a secret hope for life, something that Kyle had lost long ago to the destructive, deathly languor of the work camp. And how quickly he had been extinguished, the light in him smothered so easily, as if merely a brush of a hand. Just a flicker of misfortune.

I stole a glimpse of Kyle. Apparently, the report of the dead soldier had not gone undetected. He didn't say anything, perhaps out of sheer inability to find encouraging words or just plain indifference. But the contrition in his eyes, the warmth of apology that grazed the windswept surface of his expression was enough for me. Enough to erase even the deepest roots of remorse. Fleeting roots they had been, but deep as well.

He set aside his empty tray, smacking his lips together absently, as if searching for relevant words, or at least forethought for such a delicate circumstance. He considered Jacobs a lover of mine. A keeper of physical attachment, perhaps even the fragile fathoms, of heart and soul. He couldn't have been any more misinformed; it was merely a reminder of Kyle's mortal frailty that invoked the chalky pallor, the tear-stroked mists that clouded my vision.

What if that had been him, locked in a fiery blaze? What if that had been him, a bullet lodged into his heart, into his brain? What if I never had the chance to lay my head on his calming shoulder again, and listen to the consoling silence that never offered words, but instead the intangible world of comfort and camaraderie only my companion could render? Never again to listen to the depths of his breathing under the spell of quiet sleep, never again watch the crevices of a smile crack the fractures of severity in his hardened eyes. I would never again witness the soft revelations of soul that only I was permitted to behold, only I was given the honor to keep secret beneath my war-hardened frontage.

Kyle was irreplaceable. And to think of losing him, to think of death stealing him from me, like a thief in the night…was a looming terror I could hardly bear to confront.

I buried my face into the folds of Kyle's thin jacket, hoping to suppress the dark tendrils of thought weaving potential nightmares behind my very eyes. It was with a crushing force that I swathed myself with his blanketing warmth, the very essence of his being. Just to make sure he was there. Just to know, for certain, that he was safe.

Uncertainly, and silently as the unmarked graves lying in scattered bones across the desert sands, I nestled into the broad chest of my companion and, for a moment, before fatigue bloomed into a gray-weathered blossom, I listened to his heartbeat. Listened to its monotonous song.

One softened beat at a time.


	5. Intangible

_

* * *

_

**A/N: **

**This is where this fic begins acquiring some semblance of plot. Enjoy.**

**Let me know if Kyle is getting too soft or OOC.**

**Again, homage to Yelchin's beautiful Reese portrayal in the midst of a mediocre piece of filming.**

**Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Terminator Franchise. If I owned Kyle Reese, he'd be my love slave. ;D**

**_ACCESS GHOST PLAYLIST ON MY PROFILE._**

* * *

The Month Following the Death of Jacobs; August 22, 2018

_Los Angeles, California_

It was a rarity that the Los Angeles base was throttled by thunder storms. If not for the destruction of the atmosphere from the effects of napalm, then by the innate heat of the climate, its torrid winds driving along the rippling sand and undressing the cracked earth beneath. Los Angeles had been reduced to desertion, to extinction, from the thriving metropolis it once was to its current anonymity – a sand-brushed void.

That night was a rarity. And yet, lightning raked across the sky in tumults of blinding white and thunder rolled its deep, entrenching voice across the blood-strewn walls and the watery dreams of the Resistance base. There had not been another like it for years.

I was frightened of them. It reminded me of obliteration, the resonance of millions upon millions of wretched voices throttling every last breath from their lungs to shriek out in agony as they were consumed by the fiery artificial blaze. For their scorched children, for the decay of humanity turning to ashes as the detonation ambushed the last of the survivors. Gone. All gone.

I was still here, Kyle was still here. We were all, in some semblance of existence, still here.

A raspy chuckle echoed across the small space which separated Kyle from me as I wrenched the dark fabric over my eyes and hooded all betrayal of grief and fear infesting my once wistful gaze. Only he would interpret the vulnerable motion as a desperate endeavor to conceal all weakness manifested in me by the omnipresent storm.

There was no escaping its rumbling and crackling and shuddering of the walls and of the earth, at least in the tangible world where touch and sight and sensation were merely necessary tools of survival.

Behind the veil of escapism, I was free to wander away from my vices – and into my most fantastic daydreams. Kyle was there, a light ignited in his eyes. One that I would never see, and dare not hope to wish for.

"Ghost, it's just a storm…don't be such an infant."

I tore the hood back, and a gaze as searing as hellfire lunged across the empty space between us.

"My fears are what make me human, and I cannot escape my humanity as easily as you do. You disappear behind a veil of machinery and anger and disgust. You hide from your vices, and embrace only your exhaustion. Your strength. What makes you human, Reese? What makes you so goddamned special that you fear nothing?"

"Fuck you, Irene." He muttered bitterly, and reciprocated my own scorching disturbance in ease.

It was always this way during the last week of the month. Always weak, always feeling as if my insides were crumpling like browning leaves beneath dusty, heavy boots. I couldn't understand my impatience and the urges which devoured my ability to hide away my love and lust for Kyle.

And during this short interval of discernable weakness in me, Kyle simply disappeared behind his veil – of anger, of disgust, and decay. I never saw him, then. He was merely a half-ghost, weaving in and out of my subsistence with the inconsistency of life itself. Always moving, never looking back to make sure I was still trudging along after him, devoted to his existence and his alone.

And how I loved him.

It grew stronger with each passing morning, it seemed, and swelled and ached with the rising of every soft-spoken moon. A shard of fragility I clutched within my torn, scarred fingers so desperately that I would bleed and feel the sores of my shame. Why should I feel, when he did not? Why should Kyle be exempted from this slow burning torment? I wanted to watch him burn the way I burned, endure the way I endured.

But the only shameful comfort I could derive from these seven days of long predicted turmoil was knowing that like me, Kyle lost another figment of his being with every burning corpse, every fallen comrade, every night tossing and turning on a stomach as hollow as hope itself. He died a little more, and lived a little less each day.

And knowing I was content with this verity was enough to make me curl into my soft cocoon of denial and relive the agony of Kyle's own version of torment. I would bask in the notoriety of celebrating his gradual death, and attempt to will away the insurgent urge to remove myself from this godforsaken earth.

I watched him as he laid there, his eyes hollow and concave as they caved into themselves, clawing for solid sentimental ground. His body, broken in ways that revealed climbing vines of despair, scattered across the sullied floor with the fluttering airlessness of ashes.

I wanted to reach for him, repair his desolation. Extend my arms around his shrunken form and utter small, woven designs of hope through the mud and indifference that shrouded his ears. And perhaps, if I ever conjured enough courage from the depths of its craven fatality, trace the soft-lined flesh of his vulnerability. Claim it for my own, mine for me to caress and divulge my slowly disintegrating secrets before they withered to dust before my eyes…

Footfalls ravaged this ethereal haven, crushing it to the dust beneath my weathered shoes before I could regress into its seraphic world. They were so soft and dream-like that, at first, I'd thought they were merely a fragment of the dream itself.

But my emergence contradicted this frail hope, and I watched as a small boy, barely past the tender steps of toddlerhood, transpired from the darkness of the underground base and warily approached the listless Kyle.

He was a cherubic child, his limp curls falling over blue-brushed eyes which reached into the boughs of the soul like ever-searching vines. His small lips were red and pouted noiseless symphonies from the soft caverns of his throat. Even this waif, swathed within the guise of dirt and blood and childlike restlessness, was beautiful in his emaciation.

Kyle was always vigilant, a steadfast comfort I felt safe within. The boy's hurdling movements and heavy steps alerted the dozing figure across from me, and his harsh gaze unfurled from its sleep the moment he detected those uncalculated motions.

"Soldier, please…can't I stay with you?" Beseeched the minute, unearthly creature.

Kyle averted an inquisitive glance toward me, one which entreated council.

I shrugged and nudged my head toward the small boy.

"Where's your mother, kid?" Kyle at last attempted, his voice coarse as gravel.

"She felled asleep, and still hasn't wakened up…" Said the boy, and he gestured toward the alleyway nearest to me, to a woman whose repose seemed oddly silent and cadaverous for mere dormancy.

I gathered my limbs, heavy and resistant from evasive sleep, and cautiously scrutinized the dispirited figure lying in heaps and clumps of outstretched appendages across the soiled ground.

"Dead, Reese…" I reported, and submerged into a moment of afterthought as I sought the planes of worn and sullied face beneath the gaunt clutches of death. "She's not waking up any time soon."

She had been beautiful, behind the limp strings of hair and jutting bones and threadbare cloth which barely concealed her destitute form.

As I turned, I watched as a shadow of suspended grief almost touched the crevices of Kyle's features. It was merely a silhouette which reached for him, but never succeeded in taking him into its grasp. He was too far for that, for capture, and so he remained impassive, almost, to the tragedy which had left this small boy alone.

And Kyle had almost assented to the boy's entreaty, but suddenly, in the midst of his acquiescence, wrenched his attention toward the door, eyes as rigid and hardened as stone. A reluctant intake of sharp breath shredded like razors across my listless senses, and as I heeded the doorway, the dogs at their post began to growl, low and deep and menacing as the omnipresent thunder within the caverns of their voracious throats.

I bent for my Electro-Mech Fazer as the dogs began to snarl portentously at the immobile door, at their unseen predator. The little boy, caught within the heat of fervent panic, gasped and leapt behind my legs, clutching the empty pockets that would have penetrated mere exposed flesh.

"Ghost," hissed Kyle's voice from behind the sharp clarity, intangible and far off within the haze of anonymity. "Ghost, ge-"

The door was detonated into splintered pulp, and before I could react to the appearance of the T600, like a mechanical demon, his hands wrought of metal and malevolent death, I felt a force collide with my unsuspecting body and garrote me to the floor, stifling me to safety.

My vision tapered into darkness as more shots were fired, and Kyle's voice perforated the budding haze.

_Fuck! Ghost, Ghost…c'mon, kid, wake up! Fucking wake up!_

_Ghost….Ghost, please…_

* * *

The smell of ragged flesh wafted through me, pervaded me like the lulling wake of smoke as it coursed through my wearied veins. Bodies slumped against the wall as I rose on unsteady legs, their blood dripping in scarlet swells and trickles and were rolling down the ashen walls in glittering red beads. Heads lolled to one side, faces pale in the orange-washed glow spilling over them in gleams and shards of ruin.

Infiltration.

The sounds which had pounded through the corridors had now eased into somnolence, the cracks of lightning and rolling ricochets of thunder now a distant memory against the backdrop of death littering the base. Shouts obliterated the somber hush of lingering casualty, harsh echoes trailing throughout my dizzy senses.

Where was Kyle?

My mind began to flutter with panic. He had to have survived. But the doubts trickled into sanity, and a frenzy swirled and constructed itself in the form of blazon, reckless thoughts.

My eyes fell upon a rigid figure, its head bowed against the firelight, eerie in its obscure veneer of silhouette. Flames danced in orange shadows across the walls, and my vision began to dress behind my lids in a sheer vermillion shade. His back was to me; I wanted to reach for him, attach myself to authentic reality once again and escape this disoriented and haunting netherworld.

And as I neared him, a terrible truth was unveiled to me.

He was clutching the blood-encrusted body of the boy. The terribly beautiful little creature with the eyes that pierced raw soul. But he was no longer there, merely flesh that would burn in the fires of corrosion and regret.

The regret of losing another piece of hope for a future.

Kyle looked up at me as I approached. His eyes were bereft of all softness that he reserved only for me, portraying the putrid deterioration of anger and revenge.

"I…killed him," his voice fractured as he spoke, but remained as stoic as the gore-painted stone before him. "I did, Ghost. I killed a little boy."

I bent beside him, intending to console the rage of his doubt. But as he flinched away from the immersion into his world, I began to slowly withdraw.

This wasn't him. This wasn't my love, my soldier…my friend.

"It wasn't your fault," I assured him, resisting the urge to reach for him. "You were…trying to save him."

Kyle's eyes flitted over the boy's pale, unmoving face, staring into the blank eyes which held the throes of submission to death. The yielding to suffocation. "He was so small," he murmured, placing a half-gloved hand over the insipid countenance. "Wasn't even…alive yet."

"Maybe….maybe it was better this way," I attempted, searching for assistance in the heated atmosphere, anything to say to him, to breach his detachment. "His mother was dead, and who knows about his father-"

"Why couldn't you just stay where you were?" He snapped at me, his eyes flashing dangerously within the orange-stained light.

A lump began to squeeze itself into my throat, and the breath from my lungs.

"What? What are you-"

"No!" Kyle's voice rose, and he dropped the limp body from his arms. "No, when have I ever told you to stand in plain sight when there is a T600 right outside the gate!? When?!"

I slipped into reticence.

"Fucking tell me Irene!"

I shrunk away from his sharp demands, a sentinel beginning to fade beneath the crushing weight of Kyle's belligerent resentment.

"This is all your fault, and you fucking know it is. You stupid fuck. He's dead because of you….he would be alive right now, breathing…if you hadn't been such a fucking idiot."

I could feel my heart breaking.

Feel it rip and tear around its gnarled edges. And to breathe…how glorious it had been before, the ease of breathing. And now it seemed as if I had taken advantage of a quaint gift, so easily snatched from my hands. The knees beneath my felt detached, as if I were severed in half. Tears shoved insistently at the back of my eyes. Willing forward, and I would allow them to permeate the gates of apathy. I would permit it, this sinful act of weeping. Just to show him…to show him how easily he could break my heart.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"Because you should know better!" Kyle's voice slipped into uncertainty, and his eyes, cruel and unrelenting, maliciously slaughtered me. "Because…I should know better."

I wanted to feel him. Feel his skin beneath my fingers, for anything. For console. I'd give my soul to gather that fractured angel and force him against me, never to let go. If only he would stop those violent words, allay that spiteful tempest in his eyes.

Never had I seen him like this.

Never had that storm been intended for me.

"Kyle…"

"No, you're dead to me," he promised forebodingly. "Fucking dead, Irene. Do you hear me?"

"Please, don't do this to me. Please, please don't-"

I was choking, and I could feel myself throbbing within the slow process of suffocation.

I endeavored to reach for him, and I would break. He could send me to my knees, and I would beg forgiveness, just to hear him revoke those words. Those awful, serrated words…cutting, bruising, beating me with an intensity he could never inflict upon me if he'd smashed me with his hands instead.

"Kyle…"

_I love you...Everything I am is yours, every last little fragment crushed beneath the weight of the world…it all belongs to you, Kyle, and I can't live without you. Can't breathe, can't hope, my heart won't beat and it can't, won't give one fuck without you here…I need you, and this weakness, it won't ever go away._

_It won't leave…_

"I can't…I don't…know what I could ever do without you. I don't know…" I gasped for words, but they seemed to evade me. Laugh at this pain, cackle in the face of unmistakable agony.

"Fucking look at me!" I demanded, and my chest heaved. It raced for breath, for the ability to strain against the weight of my words.

Strength…I needed strength.

He turned to look at me, rings of cold, unfeeling ice rounding the blue of his irises. It was a mere fleeting look, but the anger there – it was nearly inconsolable.

I had never thought before about the fragility of our relationship. Kyle's unhinged fury and formality in the face of pure destruction, and my own emotional turbulence that wrenched me from all seeds of our dysfunctional society, permitting me no roots in harsh reality, or within the base. How easily it seemed now for our camaraderie to simply falter into the driving gusts of a desert storm. And the thought of losing him, perhaps forever, was utterly demolishing.

But I had underestimated his reaction to death. His habitual custom, his sentimental lethargy, was to pass by the remains without a second recollection of its being there. Burning, or filled with lead, or severed in halves, fourths, fifths, starved and beaten and decayed…it hardly mattered in which garment death arrived in, it was merely brushed aside, overlooked as a simple, but nonetheless callous, fact of life.

Perhaps it had been the blame of the child's death, one who he'd sworn, even before uttering the oath, to protect after learning the death of his mother. Perhaps it had been the hope of a future he had seen, like light behind the child's liquid eyes, boring into him and imploring human warmth and assurance. It could have been many things. It could have been me, and the folly of mine which cost us the precious life lying tinged with blue across the smoldering ground. I could blame Kyle, but in doing so – I was forced to blame myself.

If only I had not moved. Camouflage was crucial in any infiltration, on behalf of Skynet or the Resistance. To stand in plain view, stubborn and unmoving, was a wish for death without even an utterance of the selfish plea. I knew better; I was hardly ignorant in the methodical techniques of warfare.

In fact, Kyle, when he had educated me, so many years ago now, in the meticulous ways of wielding a gun, he had claimed it as an art form. He would brusquely remind me of the inanity of free-willed exposure to the enemy when I instinctively crept into the ultimate mistake.

Never, in the midst of war, reveal your place of concealment.

It had been my transgression, and mine alone.

And Kyle would certainly hold me responsible for my omission.

I watched him depart from our small, meager portion of home, his face smothered in clumps of mud and the contemptuous mold fitted his expression beneath the gore. The material of his jacket had been seared through by flame, and the raging inferno had scorched vulnerable flesh; I could discern the uncanny gleam of his blistered skin from where I stood, blood seeping from the untended wound.

I was the one to tend his wounds, always, never failing in that particular duty to him. My hand itched for gauze, for the yielding, supple surface of his skin beneath my fingers.

But as he disappeared into the miasma of smoke and the malodorous scent of death wafting around the decimated base like an unholy perfume, I sunk to my knees, and rested my enervated body against the stability of the filthy wall behind me.

The gravel and rubble crunched beneath encroaching feet. I endeavored to rouse from my heedlessness, from the descent into the plaguing void of unfeeling, of lethargy, but it was no use. I was drained of all capacity for manic sentient, the typical method of soldier survival technique, and my mind delved into the absence of my closest companion.

They ached even more, the wounds, without him there to quell the severity of the pain.

"Soldier, are you hurt?"

A blurred formation of flesh and bone surged through my distorted sight.

"Where's Reese?" I mumbled, almost incoherent amidst the drowsy slur.

"I asked you if you were hurt. I'm here to help you…"

His skin was dark, its shade visible through the churning murk.

"I don't want any fucking help, it's Reese…"I trailed off, searching for the face, for the origin of voice. "He's burned, shot, cut…fuck, he's got everything."

"I don't know where he is," said the man, and he was calm as he spoke. "And since I'm here, I'm going to treat your wounds, whether you resist or not. Resist, and I'll tie your fucking hands down. I don't want this harder than it has to be, so just sit fucking still and don't you dare make one damn peep until I'm through."

"He's fucking hurt! He…he needs your help more than I need it. Go find him first…I'll be alive when you get back."

"I'm going to tell you, one last time-" He warned.

"No, I'm going to fucking tell you one last fucking time. There is a soldier, the best you've got besides John Connor and you know it, wandering around this base, bleeding, burned and who the fuck knows what else. I want you and your ass looking for him, or I'll look for him myself!"

Another blur raced by, almost gone unheeded. But it was stopped, as a dark russet arm reached out and halted the blur in its tracks.

"Look for Reese. He's badly injured and needs medical attention…"

He turned back to me, and within the faltering colors, beneath the fatigued drone of lackluster wakefulness, I could barely trace the outline of his rugged features with my eyes, reach out and touch them with my dazed fingers.

"There, now will you relent? I've got Donnie after him."

The man was gentle as he placed my ragged body against the filth-ridden ground, and I felt my head spin at the change in altitude.

"You're gonna be alright, Ghost," he murmured softly, brushing aside a loose strand of hair in a half-hearted mimicry of Kyle's simple affectionate gesture. "Don't fall asleep. You've got a concussion…"

Throughout the graying hours of darkness, I lazed beneath the shadow of my newfound protector, my fingers latched onto the small heart-molded, wooden globe hanging on its chain around my neck. It was him, in that little trinket, beneath the clammy grip of my fingers.

He was there, and in this dream-world I disappeared behind, like sheer drapes drawing over my grief-hooded eyes, he was no longer angry with me, swathed in his insatiable wrath. I had not been responsible for the death of a blameless and beautiful child. We were alive, unscarred, unscathed, and he was holding me. And, ultimately, I was in love with him. As it always had been, and as it always would be.

But in its harm-induced weariness, my imagination neglected to entertain the thought of requited love on his behalf, and so I drifted through an alternate reality, it seemed – a more desirable veracity.

But if only I had been awake enough, I would have noticed the ambivalent figure across from me, equivocal in its shapeless shadow comprised of tarnished goldenrod and the standard camouflage tattered uniform. It had insisted resting against that particular span of wall to be treated for its wounds, which I had found strange, that a shadow would have wounds at all.

And throughout the listless hours, that formless seraph watched over me, a glaze of worry tarnishing the anger in its stern and concentrated gaze.


	6. He Goes Away

_Days After the Destruction of the 132__nd__ Regiment Base; August 24, 2018_

_Los Angeles, California_

"_You'd better get started on her Reese, before someone else does," says the soldier, easing himself down the wall as the first shades of dawn are drawn back from silver-folded gray. "Lieutenant says it's high time for all the women to start trying again. We're running out of hope…I mean, we just lost twelve good men last night."_

"_Well what the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Kyle shoots a flashing glare at him, and the soldier puts up his arms defensively._

"_Start on trying..."Ross is dumbstruck by his lack of appropriate response. How was it possible, he wondered, for a soldier, hardened by callus and honed by strength, to be drained of speech in a time so crucial as this? "Well, uh, trying to get…well, you know…get Ghost…"_

"_Pregnant, Ross? In the sack? Is that what you're fucking saying?"_

_Kyle's words are bitter and penetrating. They snap like hungry jaws at the soldier, scathing flesh which had already been previously broken. _

"_Just reiterating orders, kid. No need to bite my head off," Ross says._

"_Yeah, well forget it. I'm not doing it."_

_Kyle turns his face away from the uncanny simmering that begins to devour his veins. How could they even think of his holding the ability to do such a thing? _

_They were out of their fucking minds if they were hoping to rely on such impossibilities._

"_It'll mean more people, Reese," Ross explains. "More babies means hope for a future. Think about it. Ghost is more than capable of carrying a kid. So she'll be out a few months; you can get a new partner till then…and face it, man…we need her. There aren't many women left and…she's healthy. A little skinny, but she's a strong girl. She can do it. I have faith in her, and you should too."_

_Kyle stares at Ghost, sleeping across from him. Her face isn't moving, caught in sleep's enthralling weave, and even beneath the fathoms of unconsciousness, her expression still harbors remnants of gaunt shadows and distress. A life always moving, never looking behind the hazing rush to watch the paths it walked crumble and the possibility of returning to youth runs dry. _

_Ross moves away, but Kyle is still imprinted with the thought of having hope again._

"_You want my advice?" Ross says as he gets up, his Glock shimmering hoar in the watery light in its frayed, creviced leather holster._

"_What?" Kyle murmurs, still chewing his lip. He doesn't dare look up; guilt was there, and to look remorse in the face was to be throttled by the thoughts of lunacy itself._

"_Pretend it's someone else. Pretend you're anywhere but where you are…" Ross draws a softly trembling limb across his clammy forehead, his hands quivering with the desire for food. "That way…when you do it…it won't feel so goddamn wrong."_

* * *

The base was in shambles.

Everywhere. Traces of death riddled the ash-covered floor, and the walls were stained deep scarlet with blood. Bodies burning beneath the pressing heat and cleansing flames, built like shrines to the dead amongst the heaps of rubbish and crushed metal.

For days we endured the suffering, merely in recognition of the same tribulation we faced any other forsaken moment of life. The smoke, the ashes stinging our eyes and festooning our raggedness like fire-trimmed jewels. Much of the provisions used to make gruel had been lost to the flames. Water supplies had been reduced to waste, sullied and stagnant after the consistent ruin of the base atmosphere. What had once been deemed our home was now derelict, and as the first day of anguish withdrew from the cloud-frosted sheets of sky, Perry dispatched a small cluster of soldiers.

Edwards Air Base, the messenger had reminded. The entirety of the 132nd base would follow soon after a transmission of security was reported to the Commander himself.

_Don't breathe, don't move, don't even dare to exist if you are infiltrated. _

_Without your successful transfer to the military complex, we cannot risk moving the women and children. Good luck._

The group severed into three separate units, choosing three diverse paths to the military complex that would ensure at least one pair would reach their destination, whether the scattered remainders outlasted the bitter, driving winds of the harsh desert sands.

Kyle had silently forgiven me for my mistake, after I woke, lying disoriented and aching in our ravaged little piece of home, far and away from the rest of the dilapidated world. And as an extension of the olive branch, a term of armistice, he had halted over his makeshift tray of gruel, offering a spoonful of the gray-curdled mire. It was all that was left – our rations had been destroyed in the midst of the infiltration.

I had accepted him. Eagerly, all too willingly after such harsh words. But in light of Kyle's ignorance when it came to the biting effect words could inflict upon brooding heartstrings, I would succumb to the murky underworld, and unmask my own expression of forgiveness. His tendency for quick, rash exchange and impenetrable, almost mechanical, focus relieved him of all recognition for human emotion. And in the compartments where he was not vulnerable to mortality, he was, in ways, utterly motorized.

Dawn was approaching fast, and Kyle had insisted upon establishing a makeshift camp early as he gently drew me into the darkness of an abandoned warehouse. We were devoured by shadows, graying almost, in its age as the night grew ever older and wiser in its impending surrender to light, and the cold swelled as we were lead deeper into the heart of the structure. I could hear him breathing, rapid and shallow, but in my blindness, I could only hear him – and feel the callused flesh of his hand scraping against mine.

With what little we had, a meager collection of tinder and a few bloodstained matches Kyle had once found in a ramshackle convenient store, it was rather difficult in starting a small, secure fire. But under our newly founded base comprised of creased blue tarp and a mound of obliging crates and boxes, the heat found little room for escape, and so we huddled around the effervescent blaze, and I could not help but admire its pluck, despite its lacking in size.

It was Kyle's demeanor which perplexed me. Following our departure only hours prior, he had been outlandishly distracted, and I could find traces of uncharacteristic agitation in his gaze, especially now, ignited by the dynamic heat of the fire. I watched him quietly, afraid to disrupt him considering the recently founded fragility of our partnership, and decided against speaking to him.

Stubborn, perhaps, in waiting for his acquisition of conversation, but safer. I did not want to rattle any unstable cages.

"You know, I heard something kinda wild today...while you were sleeping." Kyle began quietly, prodding a bit of loosened tinder, now blackened and foreign to my eyes under its renovated guise, back into the crackling fire. "Earlier, before we left."

He didn't say anything more, merely sighed and massaged the knots huddling in the back of his neck, and I realized, for the first time, that it was not vague mystification at all which vexed the customary undaunted focus of his gaze.

It was, in fact, distress.

"Kyle, what's wrong?" I paused in my endeavor to speak to him, uncertain if it was still unsafe to venture into his territory. "You look…nervous."

The distress, however vague and shapeless it was, suddenly adopted a new form. An entirely new face which glowered from the depths of his multi-faceted existence and rattled my still figure, from the strands of my knotted, disheveled hair to the nerve endings of my toes.

Hostility, its monstrous rage trembling in the pooling blue of Kyle's gaze, turned hard and cold against an unforeseen affront.

"It's Schaefer…the bastard, he wants us…the soldiers…" He paused for breath, swallowing hard against the sandy drought sticking to his narrow throat. "To start fucking the women. Get them pregnant. Turn these young girls, these battered women, into mothers."

"Young…like me?" I asked. "Are you talking about me?"

"Yeah…"Kyle lowered his eyes, shameful in a way that seemed entirely contradictory to the unwavering arrogance I had always seen in him. Always took comfort in. "Like you."

"So, any one of these guys, when we all gather at the military complex, can have me if they wanted to? And I wouldn't have a say in it at all?"

He nodded, bereft of all ability to speak.

"So, when should I start sleeping with a knife under my pillow?"

"Within the next few days," he admonished, nudging another shred of tinder into the fire, and his face grew paler in the sudden onslaught of orange-strained light. "Ross told me, before we left."

"Fuck…." I seethed, pounding my fist into the floor. "Fuck…fuck."

It was silent for a few horrifying moments. The sound of Kyle's voice, no matter how grave and droning in its shameful frontage, had been consoling during the moments of sheer dread that struck me hard. And with the weight of an anvil, a heavy burden settled over my shoulders, heaving me into the ground, and I slouched flaccidly beneath the weight. I dared not look to Kyle – I was too ashamed. Of my womanhood, of the iniquitous duty that I was to perform.

"You know, I was thinking…they can't have you….but, it's complicated. And…fucking disturbing, if you think about it…"

"What…what were you thinking?"

Hope broke through the encroaching line of doubt, steady on the horizon. But at the sound of his voice, they halted in their constant rolling. There was prospect. I had faith in him, and I knew, even amidst the awkward distress in his voice, that he intended to exempt me from the anguish I was to face.

His eyes, transfixed on the radiating glow of the fire, averted from their weighted contemplation. And I could see it there, tumbling and crashing and crumbling amongst the walls of defeat.

It was resolve.

"Well….if I….well, if I…got to you first, so to speak, then no one else could violate you. I could do it quick and painless, make sure you get pregnant so you don't have suffer through it again, and then…and then no one would touch you. You'd be like a fucking sacred vessel by then; they'd be afraid to try anything with you."

My heart thrilled. It began throbbing so hard against its manacles, behind my stagnant bones, that I was sure it would go numb from its ceaseless thrashing. Breathing suddenly became so hard – so very hard that I thought I'd lost the ability to inhale altogether. To exhale. And I hoped, I prayed to the entity that I knew had lost sight of me long ago – that he could not hear the utter unraveling of my resolution, behind the flesh that remained stoic in his presence.

And all of it was in the face of his blatant reluctance to save me in this particular way, from the fate of violation by a plethora of different men.

"You know, it's pathetic....how….oh, fuck…what's that word?" He mumbled, almost sounding languished in the demeanor of his conversation. "How ironic it is. Yeah…how ironic that their intentions are good, they mean well for the world…"

"I don't…," he began, and raked his teeth over his lips in deep penetration of thought. "I don't know how to. I've never learned, and I don't fucking know what to do. And I never really ever thought about it…I never really fucking wanted to. Least of all with you."

The aching despondency in his voice made me want to reach for him even more, and I was forced, in my enthused expectancy, to fasten my hands before me, and wait. Simply wait, until he reached closure – a conclusion to his pledge.

"I can teach you," I said. "I've…I've done it before."

"I don't want to be taught," he said. "I just…want a fucking future. I want for this to fucking end. And then, then I can learn for myself. And then..."

He trailed off, staring into the fire again as if locked in another world. A world I could never find, even if I dug so deep I unearthed bone and soul and memory. But in my desperation, amidst the whirl of fear and lust and need, I reached for him.

I drew him to me, and he grew rigid in my arms as I lured his face to mine. For a moment, before the deepest, darkest plunge I'd ever take, I searched his eyes. There, I found that perpetual sorrow – hardened by lines of persistence, a will to live and resist that could never, ever be broken. Not by my hand, not by the claws of the machine.

It was clumsy and gawky, as I pressed my lips against his bowed, fractured mouth, the scar gleaming there like a malevolent spirit in the wake of his disinclination. I could see it, how he wanted to desperately to escape. But god…how I thrilled behind the mask of gaucherie and dismay. He hardly tasted of innocence, merely the rot and repugnance of desecration. Of ended life.

He only breathed against me. Permitted me, out of obligation, to move my lips against his. I could feel the resistance beneath the layers of fabric which covered his body, deeply threaded in his sinew, the entirety of his figure.

"Forget, Kyle," I whispered against his mouth, knotting my hands in his hair as I tilted his head toward mine. "Pretend it's someone else. Just relax and I promise you…it'll be over soon."

After that, he grew more gradually aggressive. His lips, his hands as they peeled the layers of clothing from my body, and I from his. He began to pant, heave little ghosts of sighs as I trailed down his throat and nipped lightly at the vulnerable flesh there.

Hands, now naked of their tattered jade gloves, weaved into my hair, pulling, kneaded against the tautened flesh there. And as the moans escaped his parted mouth, the shudders embrace his distant body, I began to wish, jealously, needlessly, that he was there. There with me as I awkwardly disrobed him, as I wandered the planes of bared flesh, gleaming pearly and scarred and beautiful in the light. There with me, as I was there, rooted by passion and unrequited love, to consummate our nonexistence love affair.

I allowed him, in his anonymous ambiguity, to explore me. Trace his hands over skin he had never seen before, flesh he had never thought to exist. His lips were eager now, in their primal urge, against my mouth, my neck, my chest – everything that seemed so perfectly nonexistent beneath cloth and dirt, but now was revealed to him in ways he had never before been permitted to experience.

I knew he was trying to forget me. Forget my skin beneath his lips, forget the erratically beating heart beneath his fingertips as they slid down my chest….He was imagining a faceless drone beneath him. But I was immersed in Heaven. My sole wish had come true, and was he even aware of it?

No…no, he was already gone. Embracing an entirely different world all his own.

One that I would never see, and never be sanctioned to enter.

I could only savor the guttural moans which were drowned and stifled against my clammy collarbone, his face buried into my shoulder as I braced myself against him, feeling the familiar pressure begin to bloom in my stomach, tingle in my toes. My arms, clasped like eager vines around his resolute figure, held him close to me as he drove the weight of his unreleased passions into me.

Back, and forth. Somewhat like the fervent, passionate dances the elders spoke of before the apocalypse, the blast that ended all beauty and elegance of a world long extinct, but never forgotten.

He shuddered as he came, burying his face into my skin, waiting to regain his strength.

And no sooner did he remember, that it was my skin, my lips that he had tasted and touched and reveled in, he recoiled. Retreated, the soldier in him, hardened by battle and scars, awakening from the lustful abandon which he had resorted to. I could see it in his eyes as he somberly dressed in his tattered clothes, the self-explanation, the revulsion, the apologies.

And as he disappeared from beneath the tent, the makeshift fire that no longer seemed warm, I wrapped myself in his tattered coat he had left behind, the smells of sex and regret and flesh still suspended like perfume in the smoky air.

* * *

A/N: Put it down here this time so you could read without being spoiled. So, I opted for a bit of plot-driven storyline here. It's explained in the chapter, so I won't go into it here, but...basically, I don't really believe Kyle was a virgin in the first Terminator anyway. I believe he had experimented before, but not exactly invested soul into his experimentations. I believe he gave himself fully to Sarah and, in that way, he was a virgin. This chapter is merely Kyle's assisting the repopulation of the world. No romantic intentions, nothing...just duty. To Ghost, however...it's the ultimate wish fulfillment.

So, if it seemed awkward, that's because it was. Well, I suppose I'm prepared to loose some readers...:/  
But, that's okay. I planned it this way from the beginning.

So, hopefully no one got turned off by the sudden turn of events. I'd intended, since I wrote the third chapter, to go this way. Don't like it? Then don't read...you don't have to chew me out for going against your beliefs.

Enjoy!


	7. Legacy

_Two Months into Pregnancy; October 24, 2018_

_Edwards Airbase Military Complex, Los Angeles, California._

I couldn't say that normalcy returned between us after the night of Kyle's sacrifice.

It was never really a relationship sworn by conventional habits or by human nature, even from its star-crossed origins, but a camaraderie born of the desire to live against the predetermined chosen fate for mankind. If not for our consistent efforts and devotion to the Resistance, the fragile threads which were twisted and tautened in winding vines between us, suspended over the precipice of destruction and deceiving in its stability...would never have even witnessed the birth of its existence.

They frayed now as my adoration grew stronger and his distance remained, never being steadfast bonds to begin with. I could not say I was surprised by their gradual slackening, especially after the encounter. But still, I prayed for the return to our unorthodox concept of normalcy. However dysfunctional our friendship might have been.

That night, he didn't return, and I dozed off by firelight, vermillion staining my freckles red and my flesh with numbing heat. Dreams brought only trembling, and I woke, near nightfall, roused out of tormenting night terrors.

After the realization dawned on me, that Kyle had never come back from his mysterious disappearance, I ducked beneath the flap of the tent, stagnant without the pull of a breeze, and wandered through the underbelly of the warehouse, searching for any gesture of life. His life.

It was hardly long before I found him, quivering within the breaching chill that had crept along the stone-cold walls. And by the way his shoulders shrugged forward, languid and not yet relieved of their burdening weight, I could already tell he had not heeded even a flimsy semblance of rest. It had been the aching shadows beneath his vacant eyes, the downcast figure of his mouth in its thought-provoked stillness that divulged his restiveness to me.

I reached for him, hoping to remedy the treachery which his worn, slack countenance rendered visible to me. The exposure to the weakness he so utterly abhorred.

He recoiled, risking not a glance in my direction – as if I'd break. Or of the fear of knowing I was the embodiment of his pensive regret. "Don't touch me…"He warned, lips thinning into a cruel, harsh line. "Not yet."

I hardly knew what to say in return. Was it hatred that froze the callous into the malicious plunge of his tone, the slope of his words?

Perhaps fear, or dismay?

For as long as I knew him, for as long as I had committed to memory the confining manacles of soul that scattered him, barren, within his own betraying body, he had remained the same enigma I had found the first moment I dared rest eyes on him. The same discretion he carried over misleading masks of feigned immortality, the same rebellion against pain and the craven vulnerability that came with surrendering to anguish. All he was, all he stood for, was another hollow shell.

Never loving as I did, never feeling, never wanting anything – only the burning desire to slowly self-destruct.

Only fighting for his hopes to revive what he had long since lost.

"Kyle, I – I'm here," I pressed a hand over his bare skin, the scars of the recent burns still pale flesh, but not yet raised. His very flesh withdrew beneath my touch. "I will always be here. I won't leave you."

"You can't, can you? Can't leave me, I mean…you're too damn invested now, isn't that right?"

His absence was unremitting, and yet his presence there was unlike any ghost of detachment I'd ever felt – omnipresent, it was, and all-consuming in its intensity.

Fear lodged itself in my throat, and it felt too narrow. Too claustrophobic beneath the desperate swallowing. "What…what is that supposed to mean?"

"Once you devote your own life to the existence of another…it's no longer just partnership…right?" Kyle's voice tapered off into a sort of interrogative musing, cleverly disguised as adolescent ignorance.

Had I so unwarily stitched my entire soul to my sleeve, published it like written word for him to read? Was this Kyle's method of confessing my own love to him, covert footsteps around a concept I had never revealed to him, and yet he stood before me now, weaving my own tale of unrequited love and desperation?

"It's one of those friendships…they turn into something else. Something like kin, when you don't got a family left to your name and you're nothing but flesh and bloodlust. Like family, you know?"

The weight of the world had released me from its crushing threat to fall. He knew nothing of my devotion to him, but a little pooling tendril of mourning unraveled somewhere inside – he wasn't confessing love to me; he was wandering over planes of brotherhood.

"You gotta understand, Ghost…you're all I've got left. And it's so fucking confusing – hating you like I do sometimes. Like I know you hate me the same way…"

I only wished he knew how deep the gashes his words left behind. How they seeped, how they stole into lucidity and robbed me of the most primal ability to think. To feel.

His mouth twitched visibly, agitation resurrecting a sleeping anger within. "Everyone has a hatred for something, don't they? And it gets so goddamn tiring hating the same unfeeling fucking machinery, and it doesn't care that you hate it…that I sometimes have to turn it on you, out of frustration...."

He paused, drinking in, greedily, a solitary breath. Like it was so hard to breathe. "Like now – I can't stand the sight of you. I can't stand to even hear you breathe, to feel your hand on my skin," he murmured, but I could feel the rage in him, pulsating, undulating beneath stoic scars. "Sometimes I can't stand the fucking sight of you, Ghost."

His hand collided hard against the rigid surface beneath him. Out of anger. Out of spite.

"Does that even make any fucking sense?!"He shouted to the walls, and I cringed.

He drew an emaciated hand through the sullied flaxen strands of his hair, and his fingers, bereft of its gloves now, paled against the all-pervading dark. Something hollow escaped him, something like a sigh – but too much like a void to resemble anything at all.

"I'm guess I can say I've officially lost my fucking mind-"

I captured his evading fingers, and he looked at me, questioning the forcefulness I rarely exposed from secretive depths. "Kyle, living in this world – we've all lost our fucking minds. It's how hard you try to find it again, to try to make sense of what's left that makes the lunacy worth it."

He had appraised me then, comprising my words inside his head into phrases he could understand, fastening the loose ends I had left for him to shape into sensibility for himself.

Knowing that sometimes, out of lapsing indifference to the ways of the world, Kyle resented me, was hardly conclusive. In fact, the ambiguity of his intricacies escaped me in every way they could, and their innate evasive tact made it all the more difficult to chase after. His anger was so dizzyingly indecisive and elusive that, as the months passed and he began to unfurl again from his revulsion, I attempted to erase it completely from acknowledgement.

All I knew was that, as his brother, as his companion – he cared for me in the midst of his infrequent descent into loathing.

Days seemed to trickle into monotony after that, colors bleeding into one another, and sunsets and sunrises held no distinct variance for me. Same aesthetic beauty, same purpose – to usher in another day which would prove as heedless as the last.

And the better half of two months dawned on me, lying beside drowsy Kyle beneath a makeshift tarp for warmth as he yielded to much needed rest. It was so sudden, like rapture, that small blinking lights dotted my sight. Where had time gone? Had its ability to pass slowly been destroyed in the fires that stole from us our world?

In the mere duration of two months, Kyle had begun to watch me, in growing fascination, shift into new light. In becoming an expectant mother, despite the existence in squalor and depression of our race, I had begun to glow beneath my mask of misery, and Kyle had never seen the human growth of life before. And as time passed, he proved to be more intrigued and confused by the life within me than the actual reality of pregnancy.

With the knowledge of Kyle's success in impregnating me, the senior officers deemed me in a 'delicate condition' and confiscated my combatant obligation from me until the birth of the baby. Before long, only Perry was ignorant of my condition. I had become, like Kyle had prophecized all impregnated women to be, a sacred fucking vessel.

All hopes of gathering supplies for not only my own subsistence, but the baby's as well, perished so quickly after that. I would forgo usefulness, forgo habit...and just repose in the ruins I fought so hard to abscond.

Kyle, out of self-ordained obligation, began to bring home canned proteins and fruits, whatever he could find amongst the debris he encountered during his brief travels and haggle from Perry's resistant first officers. And in that way, those small endeavors that seemed so trivial to his superiors, I knew he cared for me. And it was enough.

It was as we huddled over a meager portion of canned peaches and gruel that he told me of the hope that begun to swell amongst the base.

"There's others, you know." He assured me, and I smiled half-heartedly at the trailing slobber that trickled down his scarred chin; he always was the one to eat too fast to enjoy it, and yet was the most patient in the field.

"Others?" I asked, drawing a stained sleeve over my mouth as I watched him. "Other what, exactly?"

"Pregnant women…two more, to be exact. And Ross and Hicks – they just tried last night on two girls."

"Were they willing?" I allowed my secret hope to come forward, and a wave of nausea spilled over my knotted stomach as he shook his head slowly.

"No," he drawled, fixating his eyes on a barren shred of ground exposed beneath our rustled tarp. "No, they weren't really. Obligated, more like it."

"How far are the others?"

"Same as you – about two months. I heard Perry's trying to figure out a safer place for the expecting mothers. That way, all the pain and obligation that was put into these kids – it won't be for nothing."

The conversation had adopted a sort of ominous shadow over its intent, and I watched Kyle closely, who dug through the thick syrup of the peaches and discovered one last orange-fleshed lump of flesh concealed at the bottom of the silver tin. He cut it in half, wordlessly offering one to me, and took the other.

"I don't see how I'd be any safer somewhere else than I am with you," I observed and Kyle, as he set aside the can, looked unimpressed by the argument – he seemed to think differently of the situation. "What, Kyle…do you not want me here? Is that what it is?"

His eyes darkened, the pale green of them churning with an aggressive retaliation. "Don't, Ghost. You know it's not true."

"Then…why…" I surveyed the ground, taking comfort in the sifted sands, windswept remains of desert ushered in from careless boots and jackets. "Why do you want to send me away?"

"Protection. You're not fit for duty anymore, and it's no use having you here. They'll have you somewhere safe. I don't know where, and when, or how they'll do it-"

"Kyle, you can't do this. You can't."

"God damnit, why do you act this way!? Be so fucking stubborn against your own good all the time, like it'll mean something in the end? What will it bring you, huh? You're beginning to show…that means not just Perry's fucking ass-kissing first officer is gonna know anymore and keep it under wraps for you. Perry's gonna find out, and he's gonna fucking make sure this kid lives. Whether you like it or not."

My hands, at the vague mention of the baby amidst Kyle's indignant words, withdrew to my slow swelling stomach. There was no movement there, just the gentle dreaming of blooming life. But it was there – and I took comfort in its formless presence.

"It's not about you anymore, or the kid. It's about survival, and making god damn sure we don't go extinct at the hands of those metal motherfuckers. They can't win, Ghost. You know they can't as well as I do."

Sometimes, it hurt hearing him speak of the baby in such equivocal gestures. The kid, or the child…never his kid, or his child, or our baby. I owed it all to duty that he spoke this way, and began to wonder, after the birth of the baby – would he even look on it as his own daughter, his own son? Would the resolute foundations of mere accountability crumble and fade into past regret as he first looked upon the very child which he had created? Or would there be nothing – no affection, no love? Just acknowledgement of existence, and a brush of dismissal.

Looking at Kyle's expression as he watched the length of my hands sprawl thoughtfully over the raised surface of my stomach, there was expectation. Hope for the child when there was no hope for me.

I knew in watching the harsh frontage of the war-hardened soldier falter into something softer, something more child-like and warm and affectionate, that he would sacrifice a portion of his heart.

After all – he'd never loved before. And his heart was still pure behind its solid, callused wall.

* * *

At first, the abstracted whispers that roused me partially from my sleep were demanding, but not harsh. And then, as my slumber-induced confusion grew and the whispers aggressively with it, the severity was inevitable. I was shaken, hard and unrelenting, until my vision began to unfurl from its dreamy haze, and the voice became a sharp hiss.

"Wake the fuck up, would you Ghost? Jesus…throw your jacket on. Leave everything but your clothes behind, and report to the entrance gate. That's an order."

It was an aggravated command that dragged me from all hopes for sleep, and I abandoned the tarp, rustling over me as I crawled from beneath its warmth. One glance beside me, and the empty space rattled the void in me. Kyle was gone – I wouldn't have the chance to say goodbye.

When I arrived, two other women stood shuddering in their thin coats, and I recognized them immediately – the two which Kyle had designated as my companions in self-committed torment. They looked as equally confused and weary as I undoubtedly looked, shuffling into the small cluster and awaiting the familiarity of the voice that had directed me here.

We were not left to wait long, with only the dogs to keep our company and pant against our torn boots; a figure emerged from beneath the shadows that hung low over the base. Those who weren't creeping behind the veil of nightfall, searching for survivors, intercepting infiltrations – they kept to their tumultuous nightmares.

"Reed, that's the last of 'em. We'd better get a move on," announced the approaching figure.

"What the fuck is going on?" One of the women beside me, looking bleary-eyed and dirt-encrusted even in the darkness, addressed the soldier who began the ascent up the staircase. "Where are you taking us?"

"Shut up and obey orders, and you'll be fine," replied the soldier who'd arrived behind the small group of women. "We're relocating you to a safer base. Bigger and more secure than the military complex, and the best medical officer around these parts. They'll take good care of you there."

And after the man finished his small announcement, I was beckoned by the taller, slighter man standing nearby, quiet as he bent his index finger toward him.

"Ghost, c'mere…"He muttered gently.

I stepped forward upon the issue of command, and realized, looking up into the obscured face of my commanding officer, that it was one of Perry's esteemed messengers. I'd never come to know his face by name, but by title.

"Reese, he left this for you. Gave it to me at the gate before he left with McKay for an infiltration interception. Said he found it somewhere..." he reached into his pocket and, as his palm unfolded from its fleshy grip, a small flash of silver caught my eye.

And as I peered at it through the gloom, the clarity as to what exactly the sliver of metal struck me – it was a charm, shaped in the form of what looked to be an angel. It was such a tiny little thing, delicate even, that I was almost too afraid to take it, much less wear it.

"He left this…for me?" I asked as I, ever so cautiously, slipped the seraph charm over the chain that hung around my neck, and it slid gently beside the heart-shaped globe – the very same he'd made for me on my eighteenth birthday.

"Said it was for the baby – dunno what the kid meant by angels and such but…I think he's starting to really lose it, you know? Good soldier and hell he's a tough soul but – he's losing himself, I think."

I bit my lip, holding tighter to the small charms around my neck. "You think…you think you could tell me what's gonna happen to him? With me going and all?"

"Most likely go on, you know…like we all do. Get a new partner, and once he adjusts to the humdrum again, he'll come back around." The man replied, and, as a voice called for him at the top of the staircase leading toward the dreaded surface, he slipped past me.

A terrible feeling curled itself around my stomach, and I feared it would suffocate the baby from the way it squeezed my insides and hindered my ability to breathe. My arms wound protectively over my middle, and I watched the world spin beneath my feet. One rounding whirl at a time.

It was likely I'd never see Kyle Reese again.

* * *

Upon arrival, we were received by a guard and ushered unceremoniously into the heart of the base. Much of the same derelict refuse wafted over the filth-infested air to greet us, and in its customary malodorous function, I derived some numbed sense of comfort.

As pathetic as it was to correlate my own personal savior to a smell that described the wretched conditions of human living standards, I could afford him no exquisite portrayal.

He was as infected by dirt and blood as the rest of us, and his clothes hung in limp drapes over his emaciated body. His face still gaunt, and though beautiful, streaked with sweat and grime, and the hair which hung in greasy clumps over his forehead held no luster worthy of praise.

He was as polluted as any animal, but bore the soul of a quiet hero. And for that, I gave him devotion and muted praise.

Kate Connor was there as we entered her small medical quarters, for inspection in regards to physical health. Malnutrition and pallor was to be accepted as routine, being a daily struggle inescapable by all, and I noticed that even Kate herself endured the shadows of hunger beneath her inquisitive eyes. And as scattered as humanity was across the endless reaches of the planet, and equally divided we sometimes believed we were here – we were meticulous with recording the births and forward strives to reach the desired future we longed for.

The other two women passed casually through their inspections, and with what sparse tools Kate Connor had, she managed a careful and methodical examination as to not miss one irregularity in our separate feminine conditions. And upon giving their names of their child's father, Kate did not seem at all unruffled by the discoveries. Until, of course, she happened upon mine.

She'd completed the examination dutifully, checking temperature and vitals promptly upon my arrival in the underground medical office. One other medically trained officer stood by in case of emergency, and acquired tools for her upon command. Everything ran smoothly, and before long, she again grasped the clipboard which held my newly formed medical record.

"So, Irene…is it?" She murmured distractedly as her pen scrawled agitatedly over the records, but her good bedside manner was still persistently consoling. "The name of the father, if you would be so kind as to share it with me…"

"Reese, Kyle. DN38416."

I could hardly restrain my startled lurch as the clipboard clattered against the hard ground, and Kate bent forward to retrieve it, ostensibly flustered. But being a strong woman, which I had seen in her the very moment I walked through tent flap which concealed the secret haven of medicine away from the surrounding encampments, she gathered herself accordingly. But her pen wavered.

"Repeat the father's name?" She asked, and her sharp, bright eyes blinked warily at me, caught in a web of doubt. She was obviously wondering – had she heard me correctly?

"Kyle Reese," I replied cautiously, clasping my hands together over my stomach. "Is there…anything wrong?"

"No, nothing….would you uh, excuse me? I have some business to attend to," she turned to the spare soldier standing quietly beside her, awaiting orders. "See to it these three find somewhere to sleep."

She was gone before I could hardly question the fleeting moment of instability that had passed through her. Something like a wave of electricity, numbing her for that sporadic instant? Or was it something more formidable, something she would never think of imparting to me, a lowly foot soldier with an obscure name and the same dirt-streaked face as any other.

And so I hardly thought anything of it for a long while, dozing in the comforts of a corner I'd adopted as my new home. That is, until I was awakened by an unfamiliar face – a soldier who gently shook me from my tousled dreams.

"State your identification, soldier."

He was precise in his speaking, no disorderly bothering with gracious resorting to manners or inquiries after well being. I knew, instantly by his nature of appearance, that he was here, before me, by command.

"Private Ghost, DN43233, 132nd Regiment, under Commander Perry," I replied groggily, blinking away the fog of sleep.

"State identification of Kyle Reese."

"Private Reese, DN38416, 132nd Regiment, also under Commander Perry."

"How do you know this man?" He continued, and his voice had begun to assume a certain austerity that made me uneasy.

"Man? My apologies, sir, but…Reese just barely turned 18."

"How do you know him is the question," stated the soldier, and his voice rose slightly in its inquisition. "Please give honest answers to my inquiries; I am here under the orders of John Connor."

"John Connor?" I felt my heart thrill at the recognition of such a celebrated name. Disbelief rendered my ability to think absolutely dormant, it seemed."As in...the leader of the Resistance?"

"Answer the question." He repeated.

"He is my partner….ever since Liberation Day."

"What is his vital status, as of now?"

I offered the man a suspiscious glance, out of sheer uncertaint as to the nature of his question."Well....alive. I just left him with another partner, Private McKay at the Edwards Base."

The soldier then gave a curt nod of his head, an indication of dismissal. He turned, pivoting on the softened heel of his boot so swiftly that it made me feel dizzy in light of such rapid movement. I followed his retreat toward the shadows which scourged this underworld, this replica of agony and despair I had seen in my own battered home.

And as the soldier disappeared, I saw a figure retract into the burrowing shadows – a man that by face, by the long, jagged scar that shattered his exquisitely hard features, no one would ever forget. A man whose name was nothing short of mythological legacy.

John Connor looked at me one last time, a dispassionate glance that throttled me to the core, and then followed his messenger into the shrouding dark.

* * *

A/N: I think I like having my author's notes down here. Much better, I think...that way you can just start reading the story and not have to glaze over my rambling. :P Anyway, I don't know why I've felt so inclined toward writing this lately but - to my Chekov readers, I will be updating Awakening and The Female Hypothesis this week. If not this week...then as soon as I can.

Thank you, in advance, for all the feedback! It is always appreciated, not to mention helpful.


End file.
